Quote:
Based on the short story A Step Beyond the Gate / Krok za brame by Lech Borski).
A television feature that is considered to have been one of the pioneering films in the cinema of moral anxiety. The story of worker Antoni Gralak who is released from prison and wishes to settle down to a calm life. He fails to find peace though he does find a woman to marry and a place to live. The realities of the Polish People’s Republic cause him to enter into conflict with his construction worker colleagues who decide at one point to organise a strike, and with the manager of the construction site who wishes to make an informer of him. These complications conclude tragically. Premiered on television in 1980. @culture.pl
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A young, naive and enthusiastic theater director named Kai comes to a grim provincial town to put on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Although the lethargic theater company shows no interest in the play, his spirit remains undaunted. Meanwhile, it is fall 1989. The world is changing and somewhere, far away in the capital, a revolution is taking place and it seems that wishes might come true. Great hopes emerge in the little town and unexpected events overtake Kai’s mutating production.
—DEFA Film LibraryRead More »

Synopsis (possible spoilers):

“Based on a true story. In neutral Turkey during WWII, the ambitious and extremely efficient valet for the British ambassador tires of being a servant and forms a plan to promote himself to rich gentleman of leisure. His employer has many secret documents; he will photograph them, and with the help of a refugee Countess, sell them to the Nazis. When he makes a certain amount of money, he will retire to South America with the Countess as his wife.”
– Ken Yousten (IMDb)Read More »

Qute:
It’s no surprise that in undertaking his first 3D project (one third of 3X3D, a triptych that also includes Peter Greenaway and Edger Pêra), Jean-Luc Godard would do so much that everything else yet shot in the format looks meager and infantile by comparison (even the few notable filmmakers to have explored 3D’s potential fall short of Godard’s ambitions: Scorsese, Herzog, Paul W.S. Anderson). Also, it should not have been a surprise that 3D would make perfect sense for Godard’s layering of texts and superimpositions, which command an even greater effect with the extra dimension. All of Godard’s films, are, to an extent, about images, and here as much as ever he concerns himself with the apparatus, perspective, history (through images) and specifically 3D and digital’s impact on these things, as well as on cinema itself.
Adam CookRead More »

Synopsis:
In 1931 the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein travels to Guanajuato to direct his film Que viva México. There he encounters a new culture and its dealings with death; he also discovers another revolution – and his own body. Peter Greenaway depicts Eisenstein as an eccentric artist who travels to Mexico filled with the hubris of being an internationally celebrated star director. Once there, he gets into difficulties with his American financier, the novelist Upton Sinclair. At the same time he begins, in the simultaneously joyful and threatening foreign land, to re-evaluate his homeland and the Stalinist regime. And, in doing so, he undergoes the transition from a conceptual filmmaker into an artist fascinated by the human condition. Under his gaze, the signs, impressions, religious and pagan symbols of Mexican culture assemble themselves anew.
Making use of extreme close-ups, split-screens and a dramatic montage – all to enact the transformation of a hero who presents himself as a tragic clown – Greenaway deliberately quotes and modifies Eisenstein’s own cinematic tools. Scene by scene the film gets closer to Eisenstein the man, who finds himself surprised by an unexpected desireRead More »

Synopsis:

The story follows a young man in his early twenties named Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who has just gotten out of his required tenure in the French army. He finds himself having difficulty adjusting once more to civilian life, after all, the military was all that he really knew for the last few years of his life. To help find his way back into things, Paul takes up writing and he spends a lot of time putting his thoughts down on paper in a small French café. While killing time in the café one day, by chance Paul meets a beautiful young lady named Madeleine (Chantal Goya) and the two begin talking. As they get to know one another it turns out that she’s an aspiring pop singer who works at a magazine that just so happens to have a use for someone like Paul who is handy with words so she gets him a job.Read More »

Klaus Kinski believed that he lived through the same experiences as the legendary “devil violinist” Paganini, who set whole Europe of the 19th century into frenzy and through whose personality Klaus Kinski offers us an incredibly profound and honest insight into his own life; a life of extremities.

The background of this roller coaster ride through the life of Kinski-Paganini is a spectacular concert, at which Paganini as “diabolical vampire with a violin” with his emotionally irresistible music, sets the audience on fire. Thus Kinski-Paganini leads us through segments of his past and, like a diabolical magician, foretells and envisions for us his unavoidable destiny. During the overpower performance of Paganini´s music we relive, through the unchecked mind of the demonical virtuoso, the main episodes of his damned life that was continually dominated by his three great passions: the violin, women and money. Also stars Deborah Caprioglio (Kinski’s wife at the time), Nikolai Kinski & Eva Grimaldi.Read More »

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is a 1936 American screwball comedy film directed by Frank Capra, starring Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur in her first featured role. Based on the 1935 short story “Opera Hat” by Clarence Budington Kelland, which appeared in serial form in the Saturday Evening Post, the screenplay was written by Robert Riskin in his fifth collaboration with Frank Capra.
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Quote:
In 1964, with the Cuban Missile Crisis fresh in viewers’ minds, the Cold War at its frostiest, and the hydrogen bomb relatively new and frightening, Stanley Kubrick dared to make a film about what could happen if the wrong person pushed the wrong button — and played the situation for laughs.

Dr. Strangelove’s jet-black satire (from a script by director Stanley Kubrick, Peter George, and Terry Southern) and a host of superb comic performances (including three from Peter Sellers) have kept the film fresh and entertaining, even as its issues have become (slightly) less timely. Loaded with thermonuclear weapons, a U.S. bomber piloted by Maj. T.J. “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) is on a routine flight pattern near the Soviet Union when they receive orders to commence Wing Attack Plan R, best summarized by Maj. Kong as “Nuclear combat! Toe to toe with the Russkies!” On the ground at Burpleson Air Force Base, Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) notices nothing on the news about America being at war.Read More »